We crunched down to the ground that afternoon, at a farmhouse just south of a medium-sized town. We’d flown for about seven hours before calling a halt. There was still plenty of daylight left, but Byron was getting tired and supposedly I was pedaling about thirty percent slower than I had been that morning, according to John’s Analyze.
It made more sense to make a controlled stop rather than push things as far as possible and end up in the middle of the wilderness. We didn’t want to aim directly for the town itself, though. While we hoped people would recognize Frankenair as a friendly, human-crafted vessel, we didn’t want to risk being attacked by someone overcome by suspicion or fear, and we couldn’t be sure what the situation in town was. If it had been taken over by a warlord like part of Santa Fe, landing in the middle of town would almost certainly lead to a fight of some sort.
Kurt wasn’t as exhausted as Byron and I, but he’d been casting Repair on different parts of the propulsion system fairly regularly, keeping gears, chains, and, much to my relief, even my biking shorts functional even as we pushed them beyond the use their designers had intended. He heaved himself over the edge of the basket, mentally grabbing our anchor lines with his telekinesis and tying them off to nearby fenceposts. John followed him out, holding up his hands as he diverted the wind around us, while Byron used the last of his energy to quickly cool the air and deflate the envelope.
I stumbled out as well, legs wobbling for the first few steps as I called on different muscles than I’d been using for the past seven hours. I adjusted swiftly, likely thanks to my high-powered self-healing abilities, or maybe my physical enhancements in general.
Nothing charged me until I’d made nearly a full loop around Frankenair, when a spacedog burst out from under a tractor. I punted it across the highway. “Ground clear! Only one spacedog.”
“Good!” Kurt said. “The house is probably occupied.”
His assessment made sense. We were rural enough that monsters likely wouldn’t reappear for a few hours if they were killed, but they would reappear. If the farmhouse wasn’t occupied, people from the city must be making pretty wide patrols.
Davi thumped to the ground beside me, tilting her head back in clear exhaustion. “Ugggh. If we find a free Points Siphon, you better give it to me. We got so many flyers following us on the way down. Keeping them off you was not easy.”
“Well, I’ve got to hand it to you; you did a great job.”
Davi swung her truncated arm toward my face. “Boom! That was me punching you in the nose with my ghost fist. You just got ghost punched.”
I hadn’t meant to start the hand/arm/finger jokes with Davi, but I was absolutely keeping them up on purpose. I’d definitely gotten a number of snorts and laughs out of her. I was no psychologist, but that seemed like a good thing to me. Davi always expressed anger when I made the puns, but it was the kind of hyperbolic anger that was its own kind of joke. If she ever asked me to stop instead of telling me I was a horrible human being, I’d stop.
“What do you want?!”
A woman’s voice cut off our mock-fight. I couldn’t see who had spoken, but I imagined they were peering at us from one of the gaps between the boarded-up windows of the house.
Kurt stepped forward, lifting his empty hands. “Nothing, really! If possible, we’d like to talk and get a place to sleep for the night, but if you’d prefer not to we can stay with our ship and be gone in the morning. We’re headed east, not staying.”
“And if I tell you to get your… ship… off my land?”
“Well… it would be a pain in the ass, but we’d do that. We’re on a mission from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, but we’re supposed to make friendly contacts, not irritate people.”
There was silence for a moment. Then: “You’re not military. Not a single one of you.”
“No, we’re civilians. I’ve got a letter here on air force base stationary, though, if you want to see that?”
“...bring it over to the front door and hold it in front of the peephole.”
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It took a little bit of back-and-forth and a significant amount of schmoozing by Kurt, but we made it inside. Because of the weight concerns, we’d only taken two days of water with us, but we’d brought extra food and survival tools to give or trade away: water purification tablets, candy, that kind of thing.
Our hosts had been clever enough to store a lot of water before the water towers ran dry, and they’d had plenty of food on hand. Unfortunately, they were skeptical about the Shops - they hadn’t been into town - and unwilling to trade us any of either. Kurt eventually convinced them to let me take one of them as a follower and let us sleep inside their detached garage in exchange for a chocolate bar.
We only learned one thing of any note: the town just north of us was Clovis, New Mexico.
“You have to admit, that’s pretty good,” I said. “Getting from Walsenburg to Albuquerque took us almost twenty days, and it's about the same distance.”
Kurt didn’t respond immediately. He and I were taking the first watch while the others slept. We’d gotten more messages from my followers in Albuquerque, letting us know the “night slugs” could fit through any hole larger than .6 centimeters. Two sentries working hard to keep each other awake was the only way for everyone else to sleep soundly, and even then, there was a reason Kurt and I were taking first shift. Infrared vision made the flexible, stealthy monsters stand out for me, and Kurt’s crafting-focused build let him patch any gaps we saw the monsters exploit. He’d already fused the edges of the garage door to the ground and was working on a way to keep the smaller, person-sized door functional but safely sealed. His first effort had been a failure, the hideously malleable monster shoving it aside the barest amount and distorting itself to fit through the gap. I’d killed it, but more would likely follow.
“Nineteen days there, then another ten stuck in place. One more day like that, and we’ll have made up for all the time we spent sitting on our asses and going the wrong direction,” Kurt said.
“You’re not still on about that, are you?” I asked. “You can’t seriously still think Albuquerque was the wrong choice. Not just in terms of speed, but information. I mean, they were happy to hear how far we’d traveled, but I’m just happy they can notify us when new monsters appear. I don’t love that we can’t predict the arrival times anymore.”
Kurt shook his head. “You’re not wrong. I’m just bitching. As I said, one more day of flying would put us at least even, and… there was a lot of nasty shit down there. We’re lucky we got off the roads when we did.”
I frowned. “From where we put the propulsion station, I really can’t see much below us. Maybe I’ll have you re-angle Frank’s mirror tomorrow.”
“If you want. It’s not gonna brighten your day. There was one wostrich pack we saw mid-morning that must have had 200,000 birds in it. And I can’t even tell you how many burned-out patches I saw.” Kurt frowned. “There was something weird about those, though.”
“What?” I asked.
“I… Honestly, I’m not sure.”
“Get John to Analyze some tomorrow.”
“Yeah. Will do.” Kurt spread the map out. “So, our heading was really good today. Byron’s family is a little east of Dallas. We should be able to make that in three days, definitely four. Check in with them, then another three days to get home. We could be home in under a week!”
“We… could,” I said.
Kurt pushed me. “Come on, where’s that classic Vince overconfidence?”
“Hah. I just keep thinking: what if Byron wants to stay with his family?”
“He said he’d get us home,” Kurt said, but he didn’t say it with a lot of conviction. Byron didn’t intend to abandon us. He’d promised the brass at Kirtland that he wouldn’t, as well.
"If we find his family and they need him… We definitely can’t take a whole clan aboard Frankenair, and I’m not in a rush to get back on the roads. Not after all our work.” I sighed. “I guess, worst-case scenario, we look around for another fire specialist. Byron can get us off the ground one more time before we leave him, and Davi can hit him with a Gravity Null to let him float down safely. If we got a half-decent replacement, they could probably keep us going for five, six hours once we were in the air. Then we’d be only 400 miles from home.”
“Only.” Kurt snorted, then shook his head. “And don’t act like it would be easy to find someone with the right ability set to replace Byron. Someone who wants to head East.”
I grimaced. “Well, no point in borrowing trouble. Maybe they’ll be fine. We won’t know until we get there. Something we know right now, though, is that the twelveday will end before we get home. Even with no delays at all.”
“Which means another Challenge,” Kurt said. “Davi and Byron are already maxed on Novelty for the twelveday. I’m at 84 after one day aloft, so I’ll probably cap out tomorrow, and you and John are about the same.”
“More or less,” I said. “I’d like to say that maybe there won’t be a Challenge, the way that they’ve been messing around with monster spawns, but that seems… doubtful.”
Kurt snorted. “Maybe if they replace it with something worse.”
That was unpleasantly plausible.
I was spared from answering as a groan of metal interrupted our discussion. One of the night slugs had prized apart the too-small gap between panels of the garage door, creating enough space to squeeze through.
“Damnit,” said Kurt as I killed the intruder. “I need to weld every panel together? This is going to take all night.”